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<font size=3>Well, there are at least two books out that cover the
hacking of WoW servers. Indeed, there are many private WoW servers
-- you can find YouTube movies with all sorts of stunts, mods, and movies
made in them. Yes, it can be done, but my understanding is that requires
some reverse engineering of server code, which would be hard to do if
there were no server. But I guess if the hacks were archived ...
<br><br>
Blizzard has shut down servers via legal means -- both for Diablo
(battle.net) and WoW.<br><br>
However, I feel about a hacked server pretty much like I do about a
cracked game -- what is the <i>archival </i>value other than for the
hacked version? Yes, you can convey valuable information about how
a game was played, but the evidentiary value is nil, since anything could
have been changed.<br><br>
Henry<br><br>
<br>
At 03:18 PM 7/23/2008, Andrew Armstrong wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">People have setup fake servers
without the source code before. Or they've got a leaked old version and
still got it to work, who knows? Some servers got shut down (EQ ones?) by
someone I recall.<br><br>
For a competent coder it'd probably not take too much effort to sort it
into a workable state, and the developers would also, obviously, have
copies of the game or code which can access the world sans players, sans
server, for debugging and testing (or at least, a version which requires
no big authentication server, etc.)<br><br>
The technical problems are therefore nil. I'd say it is more a
philosophical one - if they want to release it totally open (as the
article I posted suggests) there are reasons why Id do that for their
games and others don't - as the article says. But the other option like I
mentioned is to dark archive or private archive it, so select archivists
and historians can access the game but the source code is kept under
wraps.<br><br>
Hell, even just the game server files and no source code, most companies
would balk at. The effort, the time and the money involved, even before
the possible need to keep it for IP rights or if they want to reuse it in
the future or fear people will use it for bad things, are what put them
off.<br><br>
But then again I've not talked to anyone at these companies about this!
Henry is obviously doing that front, it'll be nice to see what comes out
of the virtual worlds project, especially if some better way of getting
the assets archived is achieved.<br><br>
Andrew<br><br>
Captain Commando wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">Regarding getting the server to
run, you could probably just set up a fake server and run the whole thing
off of there. This would require getting inside the black box of the
game, though, and I doubt there would be many companies willing to take
that risk, even if the program is good and dead (what's to stop them from
worrying about whether or not somebody will steal everything and set up a
rogue server?). I know that these things can be faked, considering how
Warp Pipe managed to get the Gamecube running over LAN for things like
Mario Kart. I should think working with a virtual world would be somewhat
more complex, but still
analogous.</blockquote>_______________________________________________<br>
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</blockquote>
<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Henry Lowood, Ph.D.<br>
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;<br>
Film & Media Collections<br>
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall<br>
Stanford University Libraries<br>
Stanford CA 94305-6004<br>
650-723-4602; lowood@stanford.edu;
<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood" eudora="autourl">
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood</a></font></body>
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